The Not-So-Velvet Revolution

By Ilan Greenberg

Published: May 30, 2004

Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili -- called Misha by just about everyone in the country -- took power on Nov. 22, 2003, by storming Parliament on live national television. Yelling from the back benches, he ordered Eduard Shevardnadze, who was widely seen as having stolen the recent parliamentary elections, to step aside. Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister and custodian of Georgia's descent into poverty and lawlessness, seemed frozen, then shaken by Saakashvili's rhetorical fire. As Shevardnadze was shuttled out the backdoor, Saakashvili, who had served a contentious term as justice minister under Shevardnadze, marched to the lectern, scanned the riotous scene, found the cameras and drank Shevardnadze's tall glass of tea.

Out in the streets, protesters stuck flowers in the barrels of soldiers' assault rifles, and the Rose Revolution, as it was called, was over. Saakashvili, a charismatic 36-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School, was elected president two months later, winning 97 percent of the vote. Georgia -- a nation cracked open by three breakaway regions, racked by corruption and a tsunami of crime, reeling from two civil wars, pocked by constant electricity and water shortages and unable to collect taxes from its citizens -- was his to govern.

Saakashvili promises the country will be ready for European Union consideration within three years, will have reconstituted borders within five years and will operate under the rule of law pretty much immediately. His popularity remains high, but critics have begun to take shots. Koba Davitashvili, a revolutionary ally who broke with Saakashvili when the president pushed through controversial changes in the constitution that increased executive power, recently said, ''Misha makes a lot of promises, but pensioners aren't getting paid and liberal society isn't being nurtured.''

When it was part of the Soviet Union, Georgia was a popular holiday destination and the wealthiest Soviet republic. By the late 1990's, even adventure tourists considered the country too dangerous to visit, and Georgia had managed to become one of the poorest of the former Soviet states. The International Monetary Fund cut off financing in September 2003, and the World Bank severely cut back on lending. In January, after the revolution, George Soros, the New York financier, helped to establish a special anticorruption fund to supplement the paltry salaries of most government employees, from the president (who gets $1,500 a month from the fund) down to border guards ($500 a month).

Corruption had become pandemic under Shevardnadze, almost as much a physical part of the country's topography as broken roads, crumbled buildings and snowcapped mountains. ''It's a big dilemma,'' said Irakli Okruashvili, the new prosecutor general. ''There is too much evidence for too many cases.'' When we spoke in his office in Tbilisi, Okruashvili compared his walled-in life with those of the Sicilian antimafia judges who must live under around-the-clock protection. Under Shevardnadze, few managed to stay clean. ''We could arrest everyone,'' Okruashvili said. But now, nepotism, cronyism, bribery, paying for school grades, even showing up for work at 11 a.m. -- all of these have been labeled by Saakashvili's government as enemies of the revolution.

Recent history would suggest that implementing reform in a failing state is nearly impossible. Yeltsin in Russia, the former Communist chieftains who continue ruling in Central Asia and Shevardnadze in Georgia: across the former Soviet Union presidents have come to power making many of the same promises as Saakashvili. What reason is there to think Misha is different? Saakashvili argues that the difference is in the historical moment -- he has learned from the others' failures, he says -- and in his electorate too. The people are on board with his program, he says; other leaders never really had a mandate for radical change. ''There's a popular will to change things from the bottom up,'' Saakashvili said. Still, for Georgians to cheer the arrest of Shevardnadze's son-in-law -- who was detained in February for tax evasion and later released after his wife paid a $15.5 million fine -- is one thing; for Georgians to condone the arrest of their own corrupt sons-in-law is another. Fady O. Asly, who until recently was the chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tbilisi, said that right now in Georgia, ''it's business as usual. At the top level, people are cautious; they're scared. At the lower level, the game is still on.''

In the constellation of states that emerged from the breakup of the former Soviet Union, Saakashvili is not just an anomaly but also a president from another solar system. His predecessor, Shevardnadze, traveled with more than a dozen well-armed, U.S.-trained bodyguards. When Saakashvili decided to take a ride in Tbilisi's dilapidated subway (a bit of a campaign stunt), he took a handful of security men who kept their revolvers in hidden holsters.

''To me, the difference when Shevardnadze came into power was that people's relief was essentially backward-looking,'' said Mark Mullen, chairman of the Georgian branch of Transparency International, a global corruption watchdog group. ''The country was blown to pieces, and there was the sense that Shevy could bring back stability. And he did that, but he didn't do anything other than that. Saakashvili needs to dismantle corrupt systems, bring in capital and fix things. This is a tougher path.''

I flew with the president on his French-built helicopter one afternoon from Gudauri, a Georgian mountain resort, to Tbilisi. Saakashvili spent most of the flight brooding, gazing out the window. But then he suddenly pulled me into his chest so I could see the landscape below. ''Do you see how the colors of the fields are distinct from one another?'' he asked. ''In Soviet times, the colors blurred because the farms were collectivized.'' Surprised at being clutched by the president, I mumbled how pervasive the Soviet backdraft in Georgia is. ''You have no idea,'' Saakashvili said.

A famous joke from the Soviet era holds that under that system, the people pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. At some point during the past 10 years, both Georgians and their government stopped even pretending. In the decrepit Chancellery Building housing the offices of the president and his staff, open doors reveal administrators playing computer solitaire or simply watching television. ''Getting anything done in this building is practically impossible,'' said Natalia Kancheli, executive assistant to the president. Like 80 percent of government ministers, and like Saakashvili himself, Kancheli is young, 31. She boasts an American college degree, and she comes to the job with a turn-everything-on-its-head approach and a near-maniacal energy level. (Saakashvili, for his part, schedules appointments until 2 a.m.)

''The current orthodoxy is that if you change the system, you can get rid of corruption because people are rational actors,'' said Christopher Waters, a legal scholar and Georgia specialist at the Center for Euro-Asian Studies at the University of Reading in England. ''There's truth to this, but Georgia is what in the 1960's people used to call an honor-and-shame society. It has relied so heavily in the last few decades on social networks and kinship that this not only demands corruption but ultimately economic stasis.'' It is no longer ''fashionable'' in studies of corruption to consider a nation's culture, Waters said. But in Georgia, culture ''is really what the president is up against.''

An estimated 50 percent of the Georgian economy is underground, unmolested by government bureaucrats. Tbilisi collects practically no taxes; when the government managed to raise its tax collections by 30 percent in the first two months of 2004 -- an additional $22 million, or approximately $5 for every citizen -- it was heralded as a major victory. Saakashvili's tax collectors have begun to make anticorruption raids, which are meant to turn the country's businesses into taxpayers. But the zeal with which prosecutors have been swooping into offices to review the books has turned the business community into Saakashvili's angriest constituency. ''It's confusion and despair,'' said Esben Emborg, a manager with Nestlé in Tbilisi.

Saakashvili took me along with him to a meeting with a delegation of visiting Americans from a group called Business Executives for National Security, or Bens, where he endured a battery of Developing Nation 101 advice: ''Make your government transparent''; ''Engineer your tax system to encourage foreign investment''; and, simply, ''End corruption.'' Saakashvili nodded his head throughout, but an American government official who works with Bens later told me its consensus was to stay clear of Georgia.

''If you run the numbers, Georgia is not a buy,'' said Giorgi Bedineishvili, the president's chief economic adviser. He said he is determined to change that: ''We have to be nicer to investors than other countries are. We need to cut down the number of cases where investors were abused. And we have to be very careful not to create new disasters.''

One hundred and eleven days after the revolution, Saakashvili ordered the arrest of a fugitive from the law: Vasily Mkalavishvili, an excommunicated Orthodox priest who before the revolution was allowed by authorities to repeatedly lead his congregants on violent rampages against religious minorities, like Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses. In one reported attack, Mkalavishvili used a large metal cross to beat a Jehovah's Witness bloody. The arrest of Mkalavishvili was messy and violent. The police were heavily armed; several dozen people were injured by batons and tear gas.

The tactics of the police immediately provoked fierce criticism by many who might be called the Tbilisi revolutionary vanguard -- intellectuals and leftists, as well as business interests upset at what they see as an inclination, on the part of Saakashvili and his advisers, toward intimidation. ''The government would like to create a culture of fear in all of Georgia,'' said David Gamkrelidze, leader of New Rights, the main opposition party in Georgia. ''The business community is really afraid. All civil servants are afraid. People are thinking what the government wants, rather than what the law demands.''

Saakashvili's supporters argued that Mkalavishvili's arrest was necessary. ''This was the single most brave step Misha took,'' said Nick Rurua, a Saakashvili ally in Parliament who once worked for the A.C.L.U. in Atlanta. ''This is an authoritarian church that wants to create a fundamentalist state in this country. Enforcement of the law doesn't always look nice.''

Despite Rurua's words, a growing number of Georgians, as well as foreign observers, have grown wary of Saakashvili. Sitting in a plane on the way back from a meeting of Eastern European presidents in Bratislava, Saakashvili looked a bit stunned when I reeled off the criticism, not because he was hearing it for the first time but because he considered it outrageous. ''We have a problem in this country: the opposition represents tiny interest groups, not mature parties,'' he said. ''And it's us, the government, who are introducing the rule of law. People are objecting to tactics -- that's not the most substantial thing. Look at what we're doing: we're putting people in jail who have stolen millions. That's the rule of law. Nobody should be scared of that.''

Saakashvili's reform measures have created unintended consequences. Okruashvili, the prosecutor general, gets field reports from outlying cities that judges and cops have responded to the new anticorruption regime with a spasm of bribe-taking. Okruashvili's theory is that everyone is trying to extort as much money as possible while they can still get away with it. But Sarah, an American working along Georgia's eastern border (she insisted that she not be identified by her last name), offers a different analysis: Saakashvili simply isn't a factor in the outer regions, where life, and corruption, continue much as they had before.

In February, Saakashvili shut down a powerful Georgian corporate conglomerate called Omega Group for, among other things, supposedly smuggling cigarettes across the border. Then prosecutors raided an Omega-owned television station. They were there ostensibly to scrutinize the books, but they left with boxes of electronic equipment, causing several programs dependent on the equipment to be canceled, according to a journalist at the station. In a country that maintained a high degree of free media throughout the darkest days of the Shevardnadze regime, Saakashvili's TV-station sting raised criticism over eroding media freedoms. ''I cannot say all media is controlled by the government,'' Gamkrelidze said. ''But step by step they'd like to do it.''

The parliamentary elections at the end of March set up a confrontation between the Saakashvili government and the ruler of an autonomous area in the southwest corner of the country called Ajaria. Aslan Abashidze, the dictator of Ajaria -- until recently he held the title of president of the region -- barred Saakashvili at the point of his militia's guns from crossing the border into his province, claiming that Saakashvili intended to invade the region. A tense overnight standoff ensued, which Saakashvili told me later was humiliating: here he was, the elected president, and he was being blocked from entering part of his own country by a ''man out of the Middle Ages'' who derived power by terrorizing his province with a private militia. The crisis ended after Saakashvili ordered a blockade of the railway and the port of Batumi, the source of Abashidze's wealth and a major conduit for goods, mostly oil, transported between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. The four-day blockade worked -- Russia, which has a military base in Ajaria and often voices support for Ajaria independence, for once played a neutral role -- and international organizations brokered a compromise.

So Saakashvili won, but he also lost. Foreign investors in the Ajaria port were furious over the blockade. ''We put our plans on hold -- $10 million a year that would've gone to local Georgian business,'' said Hew Crooks, an American investor who is on the board of the Batumi Oil Terminal.

Then, on May 2, Abashidze reignited the crisis when he suddenly blew up bridges connecting his territory with the rest of Georgia. This time, the region's chess masters came out of the shadows: the United States and Russia, each posturing to appear as an architect of regional stability, worked in tandem to persuade Abashidze to give up power, and on May 6 a Russian government plane flew the renegade strongman to Moscow and into exile.

Saakashvili was jubilant after Abashidze's retreat: a 13-year-old thorn had been vanquished without a drop of spilled blood. Crooks sent me an e-mail message tempering his previous fury. He said he and his investment group were entering into ''a much more constructive relationship'' with Saakashvili's government.

The Americans and the Russians have long sparred for influence over Georgia. For the United States, Georgia's strategic value is in the black crude to be transported in a Caspian-to-Mediterranean pipeline now under construction, as well as the bragging rights in becoming big brother to a formerly Soviet state. NATO officials announced this month that Georgia is being considered for eventual admission into alliance membership.

But Georgia's most dangerous and fraught relationship is with neighboring Russia, which has over the past 10 years alternately indulged and punished -- but mostly punished -- its weaker neighbor. Russia's interest in Georgia is complex, said Alex Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies in Tbilisi, involving interwoven compacts with neighboring states, a postimperial impulse to control its backyard and an emotional relationship with a people Russians consider both historical vassal and a reflection of Russia's own cultural aspirations.

Since taking office, Saakashvili has hugged Russia close, as a boxer does to prevent an opponent from being able to throw a punch. Saakashvili has publicly praised Putin's involvement in Georgia without giving Russia any real concessions over outstanding policy disagreements. The strategy has apparently kept Putin from intervening in Georgian affairs for now, but many experts say that Russia will in return make heavy demands on Saakashvili behind the scenes. As Rondeli said, ''The question for Misha is not whether he can get what he wants from Russia but what very high price he's willing to pay.''

One hundred and thirty-four days after the revolution, Saakashvili, at his desk, returned a phone call from his prosecutor general. A personal friend and financial supporter of his presidential campaign had damaged a government helicopter that he had leased for his personal use. The friend had taken the controls of the helicopter, put his young son on his lap and promptly crashed. Damages were estimated as high as $1 million. The prosecutor general told Saakashvili the man was refusing to pay, shouting that he was a friend of the president. What, the prosecutor wanted to know, should he do?

For the past 13 years, being a friend of the president was more than enough to let you walk away from any legal obligation. Saakashvili told me that he realizes that many of the country's most pressing problems, like territorial integrity and judicial reform, will have to be dealt with gradually, with careful compromises. But he also said that he is determined to puncture the culture of corruption, and that change, he said, needs to start at the top.

On the phone, Saakashvili hesitated for just a moment and then shouted, ''To jail!'' and slammed down the receiver.

Photo: Guns and Roses: When Mikhail Saakashvili, center, seized power last November, the nation seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief -- and of hope. But lawlessness runs deep in Georgia, and while the 36-year-old president doesn't travel with the armed posse his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, did, he still finds that reform needs reinforcement. (Photograph by Jillian Edelstein)

Ilan Greenberg often writes about Central Asia and the Caucasus. His last article for the magazine was a profile of Saparmurat Niyazov, the president of Turkmenistan.